Eclipse Hudson 3.2.0 Release Review

Type
Release
State
Successful
End Date of the Review Period

Reviews run for a minimum of one week. The outcome of the review is decided on this date. This is the last day to make comments or ask questions about this review.

Release

3.2.0

Description

The core purpose of the 3.2.0 release is to uplevel the version of Spring Security used within Hudson to allow us to address some security issues and generally keep up to date.  This involves a wholesale cascade of library changes but the aim is to do this with no disruption to consumers. Because of the potential for plugin breakages this is marked as a major release.

Apart from this important (and potentially disruptive task), the key proposed focus for this release continues on the support for Enterprise Hudson deployments theme and Team Concept.

Whiteboard tag for new features and flagged bug-fixes is: candidate-3.2.0

Architectural Issues

Internally the Spring uplift has of course necessitated some change, however this does not effect the fundamental architecture of the system.

The core cost here is the downstream costs to the plug-in community who also need to be compatible with the newer Spring version used in Core.  This work has already been completed externally inder the hudson-ci.org umberella for the most popular plugins.  However, obscure  and home grown plugins may need to be tweaked to work with this release. 

Security Issues

Part of the uplift process to Spring 2.5.6  was to uplevel the security infrastructure from the old Asegi security to the latest version of Spring security.  This addresses some security issues present in Asegi in the process 

Non-Code Aspects

The major external changes that have been made in this release relate to mainintaining plugin compatibility with the upgraded Spring Libraries. Plugins are maintained externally from Eclipse but are, of course, a key part of the ecosystem and need to be maintained in step. 

Also in this release we have conducted a documentation cleanup and moved some missing material into the Eclipse wiki for Hudson from the old Hudson-ci wiki. Updates have also been made to the help links within Hudson iself to reflect these documentation moves and to remove dead or obsoleted links.

Usability Details

As part of this upgrade we have made an big effort to complete the migration of key information from the old hudson-ci.org wiki to the Eclipse wiki.  Correspondingly there has been a substancial review and clean up of  links and help documentation within the Hudson UI to reference up to date and locatable material. 

We have made no other significant changes to the UI or user experience in this release apart from this corrections. 

End of Life

No features are being deprecated or EOLed in this release. 

Standards

Unchanged from previous releases

Communities

Hudson maintains a healthy community interaction.  The forum is active and we hold an open community phone call bi-weekly. 

Additionally at JavaOne this year we have two showcases for the Hudson Project, a paper on the latest and greatest in Hudson and secondly, a Birds of a Feather session with a topic of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery to discuss the state of the toolsets and gain some community input into where tools such as Hudson need to go next.